Sri Lanka Asks Foreign NGOs to Leave

Nearly two months after declaring victory over the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), Sri Lanka’s Minister for Human Rights, Mahinda Samarasinghe, said foreign organisations, such as the ICRC, were no longer needed to provide “specialised services”.

During the last stages of the decades-long civil war between the Tamil Tigers and the government, the ICRC handled dead bodies, transported patients and maintained checkpoints in rebel-held territory.

Sarasi Wijeratne, the spokesperson for the organisation in Colombo, spoke after the new government order was issued: “To start with, the ICRC will be closing its offices in the east and will be withdrawing its expatriate staff as well from the province -- this is in addition to the winding down operations in the area.”

But Wijeratne insisted the ICRC would continue its dialogue with the government on humanitarian issues: “It will work with the authorities to determine the future activities it can carry out for the benefit of those who were caught up in the conflict.”

Crucial role distributing relief aid

In addition to providing specialised services, the ICRC played a crucial role in distributing relief aid to civilians during the war. Other organisations were denied access to the conflict zone.

Since the end of the war, the ICRC has provided essential supplies such as food, clothing and drinking water to hundreds of thousands of displaced people. It has helped them resume their lives.

But that’s not all as Sunila Abeysekera, a prominent Sri Lankan human rights defender, explained: “The ICRC’s role has been to visit prisons and places of detention, maintaining some kind of scrutiny of people who are being held under the Prevention of Terrorism Acts, documenting reports of disappearances and trying to see if the people who allegedly have disappeared are actually living in some other place and trying to put families in touch with people who are in detention. The ICRC plays an enormous role.”

Relations between the government and human rights groups and aid agencies, which have expressed doubts over the official figures of civilian casualties during the war or have been critical of the conditions in the camps for displaced people, are strained.

Doctors withdraw earlier accounts

On Wednesday, a group of doctors who worked in the rebel-held territory and have since been in detention since May, appeared before the media. They withdrew earlier accounts that there had been mass civilian casualties during the final stages of the war, adding they had been pressurised by the Tamil Tigers to exaggerate the figures.

They said that between 650 and 750 people had been killed between January and May -- a figure that is far lower than the UN estimates, which put the figures at nearly 7,000.

“The Sri Lankan conflict has been a number’s game for the past almost one and half years now,” explained Sunila Abeysekera. “When human rights groups and the UN said that there were more than 300,000 people trapped in the conflict areas, the government always challenged that and said the figures were exaggerated.”

“Today, there are almost 300,000 people in the camps. In the same way, during the conflict when there were so few ways to know what was going on, there was no access to the media and all the communication lines were cut, the doctors were reporting on the incidents on the basis of the dead bodies they were encountering in their hospitals and I think they have paid a terrible price of that.”

She added that one of the detained doctors needed surgery on his hand. The doctors have not been formally charged but the authorities say they will be tried.

Author: Disha Uppal
Editor: Anne Thomas